


The Heroes We Deserve

by Nadia_Hernandez



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Costumes, F/F, F/M, Heroes & Heroines, Masks, Romance, Superheroes, Teen Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:54:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25200472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nadia_Hernandez/pseuds/Nadia_Hernandez
Summary: They are the heroes Riverdale needs, far better than the heroes it deserves.
Relationships: Archie Andrews/Veronica Lodge, Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones, Cheryl Blossom/Toni Topaz
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	1. Scarlett Strike

**Author's Note:**

> Finally back to writing after a -long- couple of months. Both parents had cardiac issues, lots of work and just general blah. Here's a little story where the idea of masked heroes in Riverdale--which is just weird enough for Riverdale--takes off an runs.

Cheryl pirouettes in front of the full length mirror in her Thistle House dressing room. “What do you think, TT? I’m a fan of the green velveet and these little pointed slippers are to die for. The whole ensemble just gives me a sort of… I don’t know… Robin Hood vibe.” She pauses. “Robinette Hood? Eh, whatever… Robin is a unisex name.”

Toni snorts with suppressed laughter. “It’s cute, babe--really adorable. Doesn’t have much in the way of, you know… protection, though. Wouldn’t something with a little armor be a better idea? Like, I don’t know, a kevlar vest or something, at least.”

“Kevlar is just the opposite of cute. So bulky… it makes me look fat and with my fair skin would probably break me out in hives.”

“You’re gonna be fighting the forces of evil with nothing more than your bow and a can-do attitude, Cheryl; you don’t have to look cute to do it.”

She pouts. “I know I don’t have to, dearest Antoinette, but that doesn’t mean I can’t. This whole superhero business calls for a certain… flair, don’t you think? I need to swan around in something bold, something dramatic, something that will get people talkng and strike fear into the hearts of mine enemies. If I just wear leather and armor they’ll say I’m scared of mine enemies… or worse, that I’m ashamed of my own heroics, like Bryan Singer when he made X-Men.”

It really wasn’t a fight Toni could win. She knew that. “Okay, okay… but at least don’t go with the green velvet, all right? It makes you look like you’re trying to be Oliver Queen’s youthful ward and we have enough drug addicts in Riverdale.”

Cheryl nods. “Good point, TT. I need to cut a striking figure of my own, not confuse the villains and make them think I’m auditioning for a sub-standard adaptation of a DC property on the CW airing at nine pm on Wednesdays, before Supernatural.”

“I’m… not sure the criminals would think that?”

“Really? What would they think?”

“Er… the same thing they’re gonna think anyway, probably. ‘Oh, hey, look at the tomato. It’s rape and murder time!’ Like Tool Time but with more evil and less Tim Allen.”

Her face softens and she lays a hand on Toni’s cheek. “Oh my beloved little worrywort.. Your concern is almost as endearing to me as your high cheekbones and willingness to be either the big or little spoon. Fear not, though! I shan’t be patrolling the mean streets of Riverdale alone.”

She squeezes Cheryl’s fingers with hero own and leans into the soft pressure of her palm. “Yeah, you’re gonna be running around with the Red Paladin. That’ll be super safe. It’s not like every miscreant and criminal in three towns wants to murder him or anything.”

“Not the Red Paladin, my darling. Pureheart the Powerful! We are just totally over the kitschy fantasy pastiche--the ending of Game of Thrones sort of killed it for me, at least. The world has moved on to superheroes with great camp value, now..”

She sighs. “Sometimes I cannot understand anything you are saying, babe.”

“That’s okay.” Cheryl flashes a brilliant smile. “You love me anyway, yes?”

That smile, limned with red and brilliant in her pale face and surrounded by the flaming halo of her hair, kills Toni like it does each time. “God yes. Until the end of time.”

“Marvelous.” She all but purrs. “I’d hate facing that alone. So… I need a supehero name. Something bold… something that’ll strike fear into the hearts of Riverdale’s criminal class. So basically the whole town.”

It strikes Toni like a bolt of lightning. “You oughta be the Crimson Thorn.”

Her eyes brighten. “That sounds just brilliant. So a red motif, then?”

“Totally--something sturdy like red leather, too, especially on your torso, thighs, throat… basically anywhere there’s a big blood vessel close to the surface. Maybe reinforced with rivets.”

“You want red leather on my throat?” Those magnificent lips curl in a demonic little come hither sneer. “Antoinette Topaz you kinky little beast.”

She chuckles. “Kinky beast, yep, that’s me. I’ve got a real lady boner for you not getting your throat ripped out, babe.”

“You’ve just got the most complicated fetishes. I’d settle for you in light bondage, you know.”

“You’re sweet.” Toni grows serious for a moment. “You are going to be careful, though, aren’t you babe? Like, for real-real, not for play-play?”

She frowns. “Whatever do you mean, my sweetness?”

“We’ve done some crazy shit before--like when we chased off those Gargoyles with our bows, which is not a sentence I can believe I’m saying--and none of the Poisons have been hurt seriously. You haven’t been hurt seriously.”

“Precisement, dearest,” Cheryl says. She is paying half attention, fiddling with a lace on her cherry red boot. “That’s because we’re just so good.”

“No.” The force with which Toni enunciates forces Cheryl to take notice. Finally. “No.”

“You mean to say that we, the Pretty Poisons, are not a skilled cadre of badass young women?”

“It’s not that. We’re good--I’m not trying to say that we aren’t good--but more than good we have been so, so freakin lucky. We did stuff one or two times, a couple of big damn heroes moments where we swooped in to save the day, but this is gonna be a sustained effort by Pureheart and Scarlett Strike. How long until one of the Gargoyles, the next Gargoyle, has a gun and then--bang! Over in an instant for you… and over for me.”

Cheryl’s face grows hard for a moment, then softens. “Okay. Okay. I understand what you’re saying and even though I don’t totally agree--it is not through luck whereby I excel, sweet TT, but pure white hot skill--I will promise to be careful.” She taps a small, pale fist against her other palm. “I’m not doing it for myself, though, just like Scarlett Strike isn’t coming into being for me. I’ll be careful for Toni--Cheryl can go hang, for all I care--and may all those who would profit from the rot in this town, like my twisted father who killed dear JJ and my snake of a mother live in fear!”

Toni hugs her and squeezes tight before she can fly entirely off the handle. “I believe in you--I believe in the Scarlet Strike.”

“Not the Scarlet Strike, just Scarlett Strike.”

“Definitely. I believe in her--in you. I just want to believe she’s always gonna come home to me.”

“She will, my love, as long as she can draw breath.”

That’s what Toni has been afraid of all along but Cheryl… Scarlett Strike… whoever she is feels so good, so right, in her arms that she cannot bring herself to say anything. More.


	2. Chapter 2

Veronica wrinkles her nose and rubs the Tiger Balm into her boyfriend’s bare shoulders and upper back, working her fingers expertly to relieve the tense, knotted muscles. “This stuff smells awful, Archiekins. Why don’t you get something with a nice, pepperminty smell?”

“The crazy Thai guy I fought a few months ago swears by it. You know the one with the name I couldn’t pronounce to save my life and he kept giggling at me when I tried during weigh ins?”

“Ritthirong--he was such a dear when we had the afterparty at La Bonne Nuit--and yes I remember the fight.” She rolls her eyes. “I cannot imagine what possessed you to take a fight in a rule system you knew absolutely nothing about!”

“Thai boxing, boxing…” He shrugs. “Seemed like same diff.”

“Diff was most definitely not the same.”

“No kidding.” He winces either at the memory or when her fingers find a particularly sore spot. “So after he pretty much kicked my left leg into two pieces we got to be pretty good friends in the locker room--I try not to be a sore loser and to learn something from every fight, you know. He rubbed the Tiger Balm onto my sciatic nerve where he kept slamming me and holy crap it burned but thenit felt really good.”

“So a handsome, mostly nude young Thai gentleman with approximately zero percent body fat over that covering his essential organs spent a couple of hours--and you were in there a couple of hours, I remember how worried your mom got--tenderly rubbing liniment into the swollen thigh of my also naked, equally muscular boyfriend?” Her large, dark eyes lose focus for a moment.

Archie waves his hand in front of her face. “Roni? Ron? You in there?”

She shudders. “I’m sorry. I think I may have just actually found my happy place. It’s… happy.”

“Yeah, well poor Ritti wasn’t after he left and those ex-Gargoyles swarmed him and stole the purse. It wasn’t anything for a pro fight, just right around a hundred for his share--it’s not like either of us is good enough for much more, not really--and those jags put him in the hospital for what amounted to about twenty dollars each.”

“I do seem to remember at least that Ritti put about three of them in the hospital with him and FP was able to arrest them without much trouble--even he had enough law enforcement gumption to manage that--so at least he got sixty of it back and a little satisfaction.”

“Yeah… sixty dollars that won’t even cover the stitches they put in to close where that goon slashes his bicep, let alone the lost training and fight time.”

Roni winces at remembering the long, ugly scar winding across their new friend’s brown skin. “So your response, in lieu of opening up a GoFundMe for our new friend or asking your super rich, amazingly generous, offensively gorgeous girlfriend to help cover the bill, was to put on the Pureheart costume Katy sewed you, pull a stocking over your head and go on a punching spree across the Southside?”

“Well, I mean… I just can’t stand it when somebody gets hurt, especially somebody as swee as Ritti. You know he sends most of his money back home to his mom and sisters? I just get so mad when people take advantage I don’t think right anymore.”

“That might be the concussions talking,” Roni says, and then impulsively throws her arms around Archie’s neck in a hug that nearly squeezes the life out of him. “Oh, Archiekins… you’re the Red Paladin… you ARE Pureheart… I don’t love you because of how you think, or what you think, I love that great, big heart… and all the delicious muscle it’s wrapped up in but that’s a different story for a different time.”  
“So you see why I went out again tonight, and why I’m gonna go out tomorrow and the night after. Riverdale can be a good place to live and somebody’s gotta clean this town up so it can be. Might as well be me.”

She glances at the shredded Pureheart costume and twirls a lock of her glossy hair. “Maybe not in that uniform, though.”

“Yeah, it kinda got roughed up a little bit, didn’t it?”

“And so did you. We’re gonna need something a little bit sturdier if you’re going to insist on gallivanting through the night engaging in fisticuffs with every ruffian that looks your way. Maybe Katy can help, again.”

“No, Roni,” he says. “No one can know what I’m up to except for us--me and you, Monroe, Jug and Betty, Cheryl and Toni. This is absolute inner circle stuff.”

“Fair enough,” she says, and works at a particularly worrisome spot with her fingers. “It’s not as if Katikins is particularly good at working with kevlar, ceramic plating and stiffened leather, anyway. I suppose I can call up Daddy and see where he gets armor for his goons--he is a very caring employer, after all. All the goons wanna work for him.”

“No. God no! Remember when I said ‘inner circle,’ Ron? He is not it. He is the opposite of inner circle, even if we couldn’t design a lock strong enough to keep him out.”

“I’m not going to tell him what we’re doing, silly, just ask him where he gets the armor so I can get some for, you know, my own goons. Like Reggie, maybe. He’s particularly goon shaped, right?”

“I cannot think of a better goon than Reggie.”

“Exactly. And it’s a totally reasonable question from a bright young mafiosa on the go to her beloved Daddy. We can get Katy to work on decorations for it all later--red and blue for you, American flag pattern for Monroe, bright red all over for Cheryl… that kinda thing. We won’t let her know what she’s working on, exactly… we’ll just make out like we’re doing another charity thing and you need costumes. Big, fancy costumes!”

“It’s a great plan.” He settles his aching frame back against her soft body and feels sleep threatening to overtake him. “Great plan.”

“It is, isn’t it? I’m glad I thought of it!”

She didn’t, perhaps, but the only person who could gainsay her is fast drifting towards unconsciousness and wouldn’t have been much interested in arguing anyway. It is unwise, after all, to anger the hand that wields the Tiger Balm and in this household it is grasped within the tiny, well-manicured fingers of Veronica Luna.


	3. Chapter 3

Betty and Jughead laze on the couch in the living room of the house they share with his father and sister. Each has a true crime book open in front of their faces, Whoever Fights Monsters for Betty and Mindhunter for Jug, but their arms and legs are entangled. For them this is an act of lovemaking so subtle and transcendent that mere intercourse could not hope to compare.

He notices, though, that she’s not reading anymore. She stares at the worn pages with the blank expression of one lost deep in worlds of personal contemplation. “Hey, what’s up?”

“Nothing.” She sighs. “Thinking.”

“Obviously. What about?”

“Just Archie’s new project.”

“Oh, you mean the reinvention of his old project to get himself killed prowling around Southside in a costume at night and beating up criminals.”

“You make it sound so silly.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Wearing a costume and beating up criminals… is it really all that different from what your Serpents do?”

“It is… because… we’re…” He can’t find an answer and is wise enough to not give her a lame excuse; she’ll dismantle it with the same glee with which she atacks sudoku, jigsaw puzzles or the buttons on his flannel shirts. “It just is, I guess. It feels different.”

“See? There’s no logical difference, only an emotional reaction to how silly it seems to you.”

“Well, it is kinda silly, isn’t it? Just on its face. The whole idea of masked heroes is. I don’t know how it’s lasted almost a century as a concept and taken over an entire art form.”

“A lot longer than that. And you’re forgetting indie comics.”

“I’m trying to forget indie comics. They’ve sucked since Robert Crumb and the others came up from underground.”

“There’s some good stuff out there. Barbara Mendes is still doing cool stuff.”

“Those are more gallery pieces, aren’t they?”

She shrugs. “It’s still narrative art. And that’s beside my point… masked heroes have been around a lot longer than a century.”

“I seem to remember Superman and Batman appearing in 1938 and 1939, respectively. That’s not quite a century ago unless I’ve been sleeping for a while. I know I can be lazy but…”

She bops him on the shoulder with her book. “You’re not lazy, and I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the whole tradition of masked heroes… Manuel Rodriguez wore a mask when he lead guerilla raids against the Spanish in Chile, all the way back in the early 1800s, and so did Louis Mandrin when he robbed tax collectors on the highways during the late French monarchy.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll give you that folk heroes in masks isn’t a new concept, but you’ve still got to admit our friend dressing up as Pureheart the Powerful and taking on the underworld without any back up is a little bit crazy. He’s going to get himself killed.”

“He does have back up this time, at least.”

“Oh?”

“Cheryl and Monroe are both going to help him.”

“Oh, that’s totally different then. He’s also going to get Cheryl and Monroe killed.”

She falls silent for a long moment. 

He sighs and gently tugs her ponytail. “You’re going to be joining them, aren’t you?”

She burbled contentedly. “You know me so well.”

“As well as anyone know anyone,” he says. “Why?”

She regards him with those huge blue eyes he can’t say no to and could just swim in for hours and hours on end. “I would think you could figure that out.”

“Er… Evelyn Evernever has activated some secret code word to make you participate in risky, self-destructive behaviors so that you’ll be killed? I can only imagine that nude sky-diving and delievery of raw meat to great white sharks will be next.”

“No, silly.” She punches his shoulder just hard enough to sting, knows that he enjoys it. “Although nude sky-diving might be kinda fun and I always found sharks sorta cute.”

“What’s the big idea, then? You don’t ever do anything without some reason backing it up.”

“It’s the Black Hood.”

“Your dad? No offense but you don’t need to pull on a mask to solve that mystery, Betty. He’s kinda… dead.”

She bops him again. “No! Not him in the flesh or anything but his spirit. His legacy.”

“Are you worried about that serial killer gene again? Because I talked to Professor LaVey over at Greendale Community College and he says that he’s pretty sure that isn’t a thing.”

“It is too! The MAOA gene.”

“Yeah, the MAOA gene is a thing but it doesn’t make people into serial killers. It breaks down monoamines.”

“Well what about CDH13?”

“That one signals between cells and may be linked with bipolar disorder.”

“Oh.” She pauses for a long moment. “So my mom--”

“Either confused or messing with you. Again. Or both, maybe. Probably both.”

She rests her head against him. “Or Professor LaVey could be wrong. Greendale isn’t exactly any more normal than Riverdale.”

“That college has improved a lot over the years. It doesn’t get destroyed any more than Riverdale High does, anymore.”

“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure Professor LaVey is an actual, evil Satan worshipper--he refers to the class dissecting frogs as the Great Sacrifice--and I’m not convinced that the Dean of the whole school isn’t just a Dalmation in a skin suit and glasses.”

“I…” He pulls up short. “You know that I enjoy arguing almost as much as hamburgers, sex or writing but I don’t think I can get by that one. Still better than Stonewall Prep, though.”

She snorts. “I’m pretty sure that teaching yourself to read by candlelight on a charcoal slate is better than Murder Hogwarts.”  
They lie quiet and entwined for a long moment before he says, “So I feel like you’re pretty adamant about this.”

“I am.”

He sighs. “Your dad’s legacy. Legacy. Even dead he can’t leave us the hell alone.”

“It’s more than just that, though… I want to redeem my family.”

“You’ve solved at least a dozen murders, rescued your sister from an organ stealing cult and kept me alive after a deranged preppy hatched a plot to bash my head in. I think that you’ve pretty much been the engineer on any redemption train that the Smith-Coopers have been running, Betts.”

“I know… it’s just--”

“No matter how much you do you always want to do more.”

“Read my mind--just like you always can.”

“It is a wonderful, twisted place. Sorta like reading post-modern poetry translated into Martian.”

She snorts and tugs at his dark curls. “At least I’m not Cheryl.”

He clasps her hand. “Good point. That poetry started in Martian.” A long, pregnant moment. “I’m here for you whatever you decide to do. Beside you one hundred percent.”

“I know,” she says. It’s a happy, burbly sort of saying. “That’s why no matter who dresses up as what you’re alway gonna be my hero.” Hearing it does him good and after time taken explaining that to her in ways more fundamental than mere words they go back to their books.


End file.
